Why Your Business Needs a Blog

Blogging doesn’t just help a business; with today’s online consumer behavior, business blogging is becoming essential to maintaining an online presence, standing out above the competition, and even obtaining customers. Given the benefits they offer to business and the role they play in digital marketing today, you should absolutely be blogging for your business. This post will explain 9 ways in which a blog helps a business to grow, and why you need one for your business.

How Blogging Helps a Business

Business growth doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It occurs in relation to your competitors, your target audience, and even search engines. Here’s how business blogging helps a business in these areas.

1. Blogging Helps Your Business to Compete

There are many other small businesses out there that provide the same products or services you do. However, no two companies are truly identical, so it’s important to emphasize what makes your company unique. Blogging helps to show the personality, information, and experience that will distinguish your business from competitors and even compete against larger companies. If you want to make yourself known to your target audience, your business needs a blog.

2. Blogging is Statistically Proven to Help Businesses

It may be nice to hear that blogging helps your business to build brand awareness and show its expertise, but without tangible evidence, it may not exactly be convincing. Well, thanks to several studies and surveys, there are numbers to show why blogging is good for business.

There are statistics to show that:
• The custom content from blogs warms prospective customers up to your business.
• Businesses that blog generate more leads than businesses that don’t.
• Blogging can sometimes be just as effective, if not more, in promoting your company than through advertisements.
• Blogging helps buyers find out

3. A Blog Provides a Channel of Communication with Customers

A good business website may be geared toward helping current and potential customers, but it does so by providing information in a one-way manner. A business blog, on the other hand, creates opportunities for two-way interaction with your audience. This helps your business to build its relationship with—and not just its presence among—customers.

Through a business blog, you can present your content in a more casual and personal way, and actually have conversations with your readers in the comments section. Ideas can be exchanged, you can understand your readers’ points of view, and your readers get a chance to be heard.

4. A Blog Offers Insight Into Your Audience

The more you know about your target audience, the better you can serve them and appeal to them. Blog analytics (such as through Google Analytics ), feedback on the blog by readers, and comments on social media posts that link to your blog articles will help you to learn about what content is most interesting to your target audience, and what will increase engagement with them.

5. A Blog Can Improve Your SEO

One last reason your business needs a blog because is because it can help you to increase your search engine rankings. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a long term process comprised of a number of different activities. A business blog won’t get you on the first page of Google overnight, however it will significantly enhance your search engine rankings over time.

This is because search engines reward you for producing fresh content, using relevant keywords, and meeting the needs of online searchers. Blogging provides you with opportunities to do all three of these.

More Benefits of Blogging for Small Business

If you’re not yet convinced that your business needs a blog, here are some additional benefits of blogging for small business.

6. Maintaining a Blog Strengthens Your Own Expertise

Writing about your service, field, or industry keeps you on your toes. You have to dig into your knowledge, stay on top of your industry, and practice articulating effectively. Blogging benefits your business because the stronger your knowledge and communication of that knowledge is, the more trust you earn. Trust turns interested viewers into customers and current customers into loyal customers.

7. Blog Posts Provide Social Media Content

Struggling to come up with ideas for social media posts? Here’s another benefit of blogging for small businesses. One blog post does not equate to just one social media post. In fact, the information contained within a single post can be repurposed in many ways, into several social media posts. For example, you can collect statistics from different posts, excerpt an important quote that sticks out, or extract an interesting fact and add a graphic.

Not only will your audience appreciate these informative and easy to digest tidbits; these quick and easy posts will help you to maintain a consistent and valuable presence, which are two important social media best practices.

8. A Business Blog Grows Your Email List

While email marketing is a great way to stay top of mind, it can be hard to get people to sign up to have yet more emails crowd their inbox. Here is where a blog benefits your business. If people find your blog posts to be interesting and informative, they are more likely to trust that your newsletters are too. They may also sign up if you include links to your latest posts in the newsletter, among other relevant information such as promotions, new products or services, and company updates.

9. A Business Blog Can Generate Leads

Many of the blogging platforms available today allow for layouts that are optimized for actions that are important to a business. For example, the page that displays your blog posts may have a header or sidebar, where you could have calls to action such as download a free eBook or get a free consultation. In this sense, a blog benefits your business by creating more opportunities for you to present offers and generate leads.

Blogging is not as hard as it may seem, and it offers a wide range of benefits for your business. If you are looking to set yourself apart from the competition and capture the attention of your target audience, your business needs a blog!

Kristen is the Content Marketing Manager for ThriveHive, where she geeks out daily over SEO, organic traffic, and A/B testing. When she's not equipping business owners and marketers to get their name out there through effective content, she's out pedaling the streets of Boston on her beloved bike.